Beef Short Ribs in Fig Leaves: Inspired by Cochinita Pibil
Every time after being disappointed with a restaurant experience, I need to over-write it by cooking the same type of food myself. I just need to open the Fonda San Miguel: Thirty Years of Food and Art cookbook and follow any recipe. This time, I flipped through the pages and stopped at cochinita pibil. I've never made it.
There is a reasin why for the "lab" in my business name — I play with food. So, I borrowed the idea, took it somewhere else, and observed how much of its cooking logic could survive after I changed almost everything people normally associate with cochinita pibil.
I changed pork to beef. Banana leaves became fresh and reposado-soaked fig leaves from my tree. I didn't have achiote paste and sour orange handy. Instead, I used Puya & Pasilla Sauce by Humble House and Rub de la Costa by SMP (Sociedad Mexicana de Parrilleros/the Mexican Grilling Society). By the time everything went into my very ordinary kitchen oven, very little about it looked like traditional cochinita pibil.
Fig Leaves Again
They don't let go! Surely, I could easily buy some banana leaves in a Latin supermarket. Or I could ask for a couple of fresh leaves from my friend. But having a fig tree in my backyard was so convenient — I should have made this dish with its leaves!
Fig leaves are wonderfully aromatic. It's been two days since I made the dish, and I can still catch a faint whiff of the aroma of fig leaves, spices, and cooked meat in my kitchen.
I mentioned using fresh and tequila-soaked leaves. Since I had both, nothing could stop me from using them to compare the results. Surely, I thought, a fig leaf that spent a month in reposado would be more interesting. It wasn't. Fresh leaves added more of their original flavor. I guess the ones soaked in tequila lost both aroma and moisture. That's why they ended up less fragrant and more dry after cooking. And fresh leaves were juicier, softer, combining all flavors and totally edible (except the fibrous veins).
Next time, I am using only fresh fig leaves.
What Makes Cochinita Pibil?
Cochinita pibil is often introduced as an ancient Maya dish. It is both true and not so true.
The ancient part is the cooking method. The piib — an earth oven in which fire and heated stones create the heat for cooking food in an enclosed environment — belongs to Maya tradition. The Spanish word pibil came from Maya culinary vocabulary to describe foods prepared in this manner.
Pork, however, could not have been part of the pre-Hispanic version because domestic pigs arrived with Europeans. Modern cochinita pibil emerged from Maya and Spanish culinary worlds meeting one another.
Some other key ingredients tell the same story. Achiote is native to tropical America and has a long pre-Hispanic history. But naranja agria — sour or bitter orange — is an Old World citrus, originally from Asia. Today it is so deeply rooted in Yucatecan cooking that it is considered an essential local ingredient.
The modern dish has a recognizable architecture. Pork is seasoned with Recado rojo, wrapped in banana leaves, and cooked slowly in the piib. Contemporary kitchens naturally reproduce the process in ovens, steamers, or other enclosed environments. Cochinita pibil is a living dish built around an old technology that absorbed new animals, plants, spices, and generations of cooking.
My Very Simple "Piib"
Recipes often don't emphasize the importance of a specific cooking vessel. And it is true that in many cases they are interchangeable. But in this case we need deep ceramic, porcelain, or clay baking dishes. Great if they have lids. If not, they have to be tightly covered with foil. Since no liquid is added to the wrapped meat, whatever cooking environment develops inside those covered dishes has to come from the meat, the wet seasoning, and the leaves. That's why it is important that the dish provides a slow and steady heating timeline, allowing the meat to release moisture for steaming and stewing.
Three hours at 350°F, covered, undisturbed.
Discovering Xnipec, The Dog's Nose
It's impossible to live in Texas for more than 20 years and never come across pickled red onions aka cebollas en escabeche, cebollas curtidas, or cebolla morada en escabeche. They are a tangy and zesty topping for tacos, tortas, stews, and bbq. Thinly sliced red onions turn a vibrant hot pink when exposed to acid — white or apple cider vinegar and/or lime juice. I also like a version with added hot water to make them less aggressive. Some cooks add whole black peppercorns, bay leaves, Mexican oregano, and optional jalapeño or habanero chiles for heat. Ingredients are steeped in hot brine or citrus juice and left to marinate in the refrigerator for at least an hour. For my dinner, I prepared a very simple version with just black pepper and thinly sliced garlic.
Then, while researching cochinita pibil, I learned about xnipec. Xnipec — also written ixnipec, xni'pec, xnipek, and a few other ways — is traditional Yucatecan pickled red onions. The name! It is commonly translated from Maya as “dog’s nose.” The explanation is that enough habanero makes your nose run until it becomes wet like a dog’s nose.
Versions vary, but habanero, red onion, sour orange, and salt are essential elements. Unfortunately, I needed to serve my dinner in about 30 minutes, and the only ingredient I had out of that list was red onion. So traditional xnipec was not happening. Improvisation was.
I drained my quickly pickled onions, added thin strips of charred and peeled poblano and Hatch (roughly 1/3 the amount of onions), seasoned with a pinch of salt, and added 3 tbsp of freshly squeezed calamansi juice. Shook the jar to mix everything well and left it on the counter for another 20-30 minutes before dinner.
This xnipec-inspired version of pickled red onions definitely stays! So good!
Cochinita Pibil with Wagyu Beef Short Ribs
Let me share my tasting notes of cochinita pibil-inspired wagyu beef short ribs in fig leaves. The short ribs were boneless, and I expected them to pull apart the way pulled pork does — falling into shreds under a fork. They didn't. I needed a knife to cut through, and for a second that worried me. Should it have cooked longer? The first bite answered that. The meat did melt — extremely tender, soft, juicy — but it also kept a specific density, a structure that hadn't given up. I could clearly identify it as beef, by both look and taste. And all the other aromas merged into one, while each stayed recognizable on its own.
No crust at all — just soft and even all the way through. Deep brown, as expected. The leaves themselves had turned a dark green with an olive tint.
What I didn't expect was a clear golden liquid on the bottom of the dish — a lip-smacking beef stock with a layer of wagyu fat on top. Just beautiful. It's visible in the video.
About the fig leaves. I'm fairly sure that if I hadn't cooked so many dishes with them this season, I wouldn't be able to describe their contribution here clearly. In desserts — cheesecake, tres leches — sugar pulls the fig leaf flavor forward; I've written about that before. Here, against beef this strong and a marinade even stronger, the leaves don't announce themselves the same way. But they leave a note. You can pick it out, if you already know what you're smelling for.
The connection to pibil is inspiration rather than authenticity, and I am perfectly happy with that distinction.
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